Jeremiah pops the question "Will URL's go away?" and says the future is "content to be found and served through context". With search engines getting increasingly sophisticated, at least from a consumer perspective URL's are getting abstracted. You don't have to know the URL of a resource to get to it- as long as you have a decent idea of content and the context surrounding the content. However, in a Web 2.0 world URL's will continue to be the bedrock of how information is referenced and consumed by applications. Take REST for example. External interfaces of typically procedural applications that are current exposed as method calls would now become URL's. URL's might be getting hidden away from the end consumer of content, but will become increasingly relevant at the plumbing and the infrastructural layer.  Consumer Internet Technology

Amit Ranjan writes about the launch of IE 8 Beta. "Internet Explorer 8 beta launched today and its new features promise to take the browser to new standards of user friendliness and safety." Surely there is a web 2.0 flavour. Should you switch ? Read PC World's comparison of Safari, Firefox and IE. It calls IE 8 a "work in progress". Want a walkthrough before you install ? Check out this nice youtube video.

 

Consumer Internet Products Technology

Vinnie blogs about Gartner bringing down their site for scheduled maintenance with a cookie cutter "apology" page and asks "Does Gartner provide a SLA ?". For a second the post took me back to 1996, when the web was in it's infancy. Penetration and thus user volumes were low. Application servers were still not properly clusterable and outages were frequent. A quick search revealed that Amazon does have an amazing uptime. According to Webmetrics the Amazon uptimes are:

Web Service	Average Uptime	Average Response Time
Amazon S3 REST API	99.9915%	1.63 sec
Amazon S3 SOAP API	99.9912%	1.55 sec

 

Does all this mean Gartner has to have an SLA when Amazon does ? I think the key is the source of value. Gartner draws it's value almost entirely from proprietary content and from a strong brand built on the idea of proprietary content. Content is king.

Amazon's value is based on transactive sophistication (just check out their one click ordering). and amazing customer service. They don't sell anything 'unique'. They make the buying process somewhat a pleasure and yes the prices are great. Context and service is king.

Now, what happens if Gartner is down and you wanted an article desparately ? You'd have no option but to wait. Even if you find the exact same content freely availaible on the web you still can't use it like you would be able to use Gartner content. To know the difference, just try quoting from Gartner to a client and make the same quote like you are saying it yourself.

If Amazon is down or even slow, a good proportion of customers would simply go elsewhere. With Amazon becoming a cloud player, performance has become even more critical. It's not only Amazon that looses money, but also the folks who rely on their infrastructure.  

Consumer Internet

Shripriya brings up the fact that online social habits have changed a lot in the last few years. But is the change broad based from a demographics perspective or it is limited to some pockets ? Techcruch indicates that there are almost as many facebook users who are 35+ than teens and college goers put together. Sizlopedia paints a lopsided picture of Orkut users with 56% of users below 25. Comscore says "More than Half of MySpace Visitors are Now Age 35 or Older, as the Site’s Demographic Composition Continues to Shift". While each site has a dominant niche, put together, we seem to be getting broad based from a big picture perspective.Consumer Internet

Looks like a cool feature to me. You can check out the full story at Cnet.

Consumer Internet

My recent attempts to get back a tax refund lead me to the tax dept's website which had a prominent marquee running that said "New Income Tax blog". Here's the landing page of the blog. Yes. That's correct. You need a goddamn login id and a password to read the "blog" and there seems to be no way of knowing how to get login credentials. If someone can help me get into this blog I would love to know what the babus in the tax dept are thinking. Will be a good case study on how not to use blogging as a medium.


     

Bullshit Consumer Internet Gotchas Indian Business

It is probably for the first time that Sun is trying to monetize Java directly with it's JavaFX Mobile software. Sun has previously attacked this market with Mobile Interface Device Profile (MIDP) with success but has lead to a fragmented market with huge incompatibility problems. If JavaFX delivers on the promise of solving these incompatibility problems, it will bring down costs of mobile phone app s/w. This has very interesting possibilities for ecommerce (I know it's not fashionable anymore :-)) in countries like India, where the gap between PC penetration and mobile penetration is huge.

Consumer Internet Digital divide

There has been much talk about all the crap that comes loaded with a new PC and why this needs to go. There are six types of crapware if this classification is to be believed :

Adware

Foistware

Spyware

Hijackware

DriveByDownloaders

Porn diallers

While nobody would want spyware and the like, I see a lot of positive upside in allowing Adware and Foistware to thrive. Here's why:

They help reduce the cost of the PC by letting PC manufacturers sell real estate. While users in developed countries might rather pay a few dollars more to avoid Adware, the same is not necessarily true in the retail PC market in a country like India. Here, PCs are a luxury for most people. Every dollar counts and the mass market would not mind a couple of popups in exchange for cash. In fact, reducing the cost of the PC/other entry devices is critical for the retail market in developing countries to explode. I forsee Adware getting into mobile phones in India big time soon. The mobile phone will be the next biggest shopping mall in the world and there can be no mall without ads!


AdWares that gather browsing/usage can also be used to reduce end user costs. In a web2.0 world, user demographics and information on online habits are very very valuable. Google and Microsoft often ask users if anonymous information can be sent to improve software. I think there needs to be a bill of rights that lets end users charge for providing this kind of information. 


Commerical software than piggybacks on free ware (foistware) should subsidize the cost of free ware and thereby help the consumer get more choice and better software. 


Ultimately, it is for the consumer to decide what he wants, but Adware is just not plain crap.

Consumer Internet Indian Business Web2.0

The McKinsey report on Web 2.0 and the relative lack of corporate interest in mashups made me dig a little deeper. I pulled out some data from the programmable web and did a run of MsExcel and this is what the top ten mashup API categories look like.

Here are some quick thoughts:
All the categories are consumer internet based.

Mapping and search predominate thanks to Google and Yahoo

The enterprise potential of mashups is largely untapped at least as far as these stats go.

Consumer Internet programming Technology Web2.0

Check out this innovative concept of drive by WiFi being pioneered by United Villages. They offer email in Indian villages for as low as 1 Re per email (1 Rs is 2.2 cents approx). It might sound ridiculous to charge for email itself. But remember we are talking of remote and isolated villages here with no regular form of connectivity. This reminds me of C.K.Prahalad's Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid. Let us do a quick economics check on this model:
Population of Indian villages :                                             718910672.9
Hypothetical internet penetration percentage in villages :  .05 %  (3.5 % is the all India figure ).
Hypothetical number of emails in a month/person        :   2 
Annual Revenue                                                      :  $ 18.9 Million (assuming 2.2 cents per email).
This is just revenue from email alone. A whole host of value added services can be brough to the table once the basics are in place. I don't know what the cost structure of this model is but seems interesting at first glance. Would love to know what you think ? Is this a money spinner or will it fall flat like the Simputer ?


PS: John Roese, CTO Nortel, has an interesting viewpoint that while we enter an era of hyper connectivity, we need to keep the economic and social impact of the connection in mind lest we actually start worsening the digital divide. Consumer Internet Digital divide Indian Business Life